Pathways to Resilience (2007-2015)

Transitioning from one service to another can be a confusing and stressful process, especially for youth. The risks they face in the home or community, as well as their strengths and abilities impact what services youth are referred to. The Pathways to Resilience Project seeks to better understand how youth navigate between mandated services (child welfare, education, mental health, and youth justice) to successful outcomes.

Introduction:

The Pathways to Resilience Research Project (PTR) is a mixed methods research study that examines service use patterns, personal and ecological risk factors, and aspects of resilience of youth across different cultures, contexts, and with complex service histories. It began in Canada and now includes partners in at least five countries: Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Colombia, and China.

We partner with communities and service providers in each of the above countries to help them identify:

The culturally specific aspects of resilience (strengths and capacities) that young people in their community use to cope with problems.

The psychological, social, and environmental risks that young people face.

Young people’s service use patterns, i.e. their use of mandated services like Child Welfare, Corrections, Mental Health, Addictions, and Special Educational Services at school, their use of informal supports from their family and communities, and their use of informal services provided by families, communities and local not-for-profit community organizations.

The Pathways to Resilience Research Project (PTR) is a series of studies that integrates both quantitative and qualitative research methods. It began in Canada in 2007 with funding from the National Crime Prevention Centre (NCPC), and will continue until 2014 with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the International Development Research Centre, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology in New Zealand.

Goal:

The principal goal of the Pathways to Resilience Project is to identify pathways that result in positive psychosocial outcomes for youth who face significant levels of adversity.

*In other words: to identify what helps young people do well, despite facing risks.*

In addition to this, the goals of the Pathways to Resilience Project are:

To identify pathways through mandated and informal services; the informal family and community supports available to youth; and which service use pathways and support networks are most predictive of positive psychosocial outcomes for youth who face significant levels of adversity.

To provide participating communities, schools, governments, and service providers a very detailed understanding of young people’s ways of coping with adversity and the risks they face.

To help service providers from many different organizations find ways to coordinate services, create new services young people say they need, and find ways young people can engage with community and family supports that can help them “grow up well” despite the challenges they face.

Participants:

Youth participating in the Pathways to Resilience Project are between the ages of 13 and 19. We seek the following three groups of young people:

Youth using at least one mandated service. We ask for referrals from child protection workers, mental health counsellors, corrections officers, school guidance counsellors, as well as community groups working with youth. These are the Service User population. In most cases, we seek youth who are using more than one service or community support to ensure we reach the youth most at-risk and in need of intervention.

Youth who are known to face many risks but who are still doing well. We ask communities to identify these youth. This is culturally and contextually relevant. Youth who are doing well in each of our various sites look different. Any young person community advisors say faces significant risk but is still doing well is ideal for the study.

Youth who are living in the community. We select youth living in the same community as the youth from the previous two samples. We have found it easiest to find these young people through their schools or by putting up posters in their community, or simply by going door-to-door and locating young people who are willing to be interviewed.

Methods:

The Pathways to Resilience Project includes both qualitative and quantitative methods. All youth referred to the study complete the Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure (PRYM). Two sub-samples of youth are then invited to continue their participation in the study. When youth who are between the ages of 13 and 15 we follow their progress for up to three years, seeing if their pattern of service use, the risks they face, and their resilience, changes. We meet with them annually, asking of them to complete the PRYM again each time. This longitudinal data helps us understand how service use patterns change as young people make the transition from child to young adult.

We also conduct very detailed one-on-one qualitative interviews that let a second sub-sample of young people tell us, in their own words, about the risks they face, resources available to them, their coping strategies and what’s helpful and unhelpful in their context.

When possible, and with the informed consent of participants, we review the service files of multiple service using youth in order to better understand the pathways they’ve traveled between services, and the full scope of all the services they have received from each provider. Using a grounded theory approach to data analysis, we look for common themes throughout the qualitative data.

Local researchers hold focus groups with young people, their caregivers, and service providers to help analyze the data and make recommendations for new policies and interventions.

Finally, we support the development of pilot initiatives that reach out to vulnerable youth, help coordinate services better, or connect youth to informal supports. Anything that fosters resilience, and is relevant to a local community, can be supported by the PTR. Our role as researchers is to help each community establish an intervention and then use our multiple research methods to set up program and evaluate it to see if it is helping.

Tools: What is the PRYM?

The PRYM comprises a collection of validated scales and explores young people’s resilience, the risks they face, the supports available to them and their service use patterns.

The measure takes approximately 50 minutes to complete and is ordinarily read through with the young person. The measure has also been designed for use with youth as young as nine years old, as well as an adult person who knows the youth well. All methods are designed to be adapted for use in local sites, ensuring cultural and contextual relevance.

Results:

Though still in progress, one of the major findings from the PTR is that positive service use experiences facilitate resilience processes, which in turn leads to functional outcomes for youth (Ungar, M., Liebenberg, L., Armstrong, M., Dudding, P., and Van de Vijver, F. (2013). Patterns of Psychosocial Service Use: Individual and Contextual Risk factors, and Resilience among Adolescents Using Multiple Services. Child Abuse and Neglect, 37, 150-159).

What this means is that when you have a positive experience with a service, they feel value, listened to, they have decision making power over what happens to them, they are more likely to have resilience processes (for example, a strong belief system, be connected to their environment or community, have friendships with supportive peers, and have coping and social skills). Once these processes have been supported and developed, youth do well, which looks different depending on the culture and context.

The concept of supporting youth resilience is also captured in this short video.

Click here for the resilience tree model, and learn more about supporting youth resilience!

Watch this short video for a summary of the preliminary findings of the Pathways to Resilience Project. We met with young people across Atlantic Canada and asked them about risks they face and how service providers can support them.

Youth from various services have also put together short videos about the findings from their specific program. Overwhelmingly, youth have completed videos about the role that adults, such as service providers have on their well-being and experience of the program.

Research Sites:

The PTR is being carried out in five countries: Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Colombia, and China. For more information on these sites visit internationalresilience.org.

Pathways to Resilience is an ongoing project at the resilience research centre. For further information on the study, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call (902) 494-3050.

Investigators:

Each site includes a small advisory committee of two to three local individuals who can help to identify appropriate ways to access youth, help to define the construct of resilience, and oversee the ethical application of the research in their community. These individuals are also influential in their community of service providers and act as aids for dissemination of results to practitioners and policy makers.

Publications and Reports:

Reports on each of the research contexts can be found on our report page.

Li, Haibin, Liebenberg, L., and Ungar, M. (under review). Understanding Service Provision and Utilization for Vulnerable Youth: Evidence from Multiple Informants. Submitted to Child and Family Social Work. [IF=0.831]

Sanders, J., Munford, R., Liebenberg, L., and Ungar, M. (under review). The peer paradox: Implications for policy and practice of the tensions that peer relationships raise for vulnerable youth. Submitted to Child and Family Social Work. [IF=.831]

Stevens, K., Munford, R., Sanders, J., Liebenberg, L. and Ungar, M. (in press). Change, relationships and implications for practice: The experiences of young people who use multiple services. Submitted to International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies.

Theron, L. C. (In press). Using research to influence policy and practice: The case of the Pathways-to-Resilience Study, South Africa. In A. Abubakar & F. van de Vjiver (Eds.), Handbook of applied developmental psychology for Sub Saharan Africa. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.

Liebenberg, L., and Ungar, M. (2014). A Comparison of Service Use among Youth Involved with Juvenile Justice and Mental Health. Children and Youth Services Review, 39, 117-122. 10.1016/j.childyouth.2014.02.007 [IF= 1.37]